Heavy metal music, a car peeling out, fire-breathing hot rods and smoke on top of smoke on top of smoke. That’s how the first episode of Mobsteel—debuting on NBCSN August 16th at 6pm ET—starts up. And then it stalls.
The first line of the show, before we even meet the cast of characters that make up the Mobsteel crew, is “that’s what horsepower smells like, boys.” Yes, it was the first one of many hand-selected cheesy catch phrases some member of the production staff was tabbed with writing for a group of custom car builders who are suddenly trying to become reality stars.
The search for the next great reality TV dynasty has seen dozens of shops just like Mobsteel get their own shows, and through two episodes, Adam Genei, his wife and business partner Pam and their team of Steve “Steve-O” Ryan, Doug “Wheatbread” Haines and Ron Coan do very little in separating themselves from the pack.
In fact, Mobsteel the TV show probably isn’t doing justice to Mobsteel the car building brand. There’s something that draws you to the cast almost immediately—much of which has to do with their connection to Detroit and how important the auto industry has been for generations in that part of the country. Rather than tapping into the grittiness of where Mobsteel is and what running a business in that community means to those involved, NBCSN and Hoff Productions give the audience a run-of-the-mill reality TV retread in desperate need of direction.
Take the intro to the show as a perfect example, as Genei sells both his brand, and the show itself, with a combination of two very different sales pitches.
“We’re in Detroit, and we build some BADASS cars,” Genei says. “Handmade, Detroit steel. Real sweetboy rides.” That sounds exactly like every other hot rod show, and does nothing to get the audience interested in watching yet another version of the same old ride.
“Mobsteel is all about that soul the city has to offer,” Genei continued, “and we like to put that in every ride we build.”
There you go. That’s something. That’s the show. Or at least it should be.
Through two episodes offered for review from NBCSN, the highlights come when Genei and his crew travel to other local shops, talking with Detroit automotive lifers about a everything from a piece of junk Lincoln they want to an old truck in a junkyard they need to an explanation of how to custom manufacture rims—Genei also owns his own custom wheel company in the same shop as Mobsteel—to going to an old diesel shop to take apart, test and rebuild a motor with 350,000 miles into a 500-horsepower beast.
Grounding the show in its roots—in Detroit’s roots—would not only make the show different from the other crap-car turned dream-ride programs we’ve seen time and time before, but it would give Mobsteel a path away from the formulaic brand of reality television that makes shows like this terribly boring.
Watching people work is boring, even when their jobs are cool. So rather than make up little crises like every other reality show, Mobsteel has a chance to flip the script and make it a show about Detroit, as seen through the eyes of a big-city shop with a small-town feel.
There are other ways to fix the show, too. For starters, NBCSN either needs to cut the show down to 30 minutes or the producers have to edit together multiple builds, because there is no way watching four guys take apart and rebuild an 1963 Lincoln into nothing more than a nicer looking Lincoln is worth 60 minutes of your day.
Second, unlike CNBC’s Car Chasers, which is all about finding cars, negotiating a good price and flipping them for a profit, Mobsteel didn’t even have the payoff of… a payoff.
In the first episode you will meet Jamie, a hard-working auto guy Genei calls “the all-American story” who was looking for, in his words, “a hardcore gangster looking ride. Lincoln, ’63 maybe…Mobsteel style, you know what I’m saying?”
We know what you’re saying, Jamie, and, I’m sorry, but that does not make for good TV.
Jamie’s a blue collar Detroit guy, and they made it clear he’s saved up for this car for years, so he doesn’t have enough money to make a “six figure ride” like they often do at Mobsteel. Too much of the episode was about staying under budget, especially when we learn the crew got an old beat up Lincoln that, wow, happened to be the same year Jamie wanted, for $6000, then went to a junkyard that, wow, also happened to have the same year car to buy a $600 hood.
In the end, we never find out how much Jamie paid for the car, if the crew stayed anywhere near budget or even how much it would cost us to have a jalopy turned into a masterpiece like Jamie’s. There was literally zero payoff, outside of Adam handing Jamie a fedora to wear on his test drive.
A fedora? Just hit me with a car right now.
Instead of an actual payoff in episode one we got Ron wearing a box on his head to avoid getting sparks in his eyes, and Wheatbread talking about how happy he is that he isn’t called Corndog, which is Ron’s nickname that nobody actually calls him because he looks like a crazy man who will eat you like a corndog if you call him that. Oh, and because they’re goofballs, see.
Every reality show is going to have some inherent nonsense, but the Chumleesque Duck Dynastied Honey-Boo Booing of every show to come down the pike these days is redundant and tiresome. For a show on NBCSN, Mobsteel had a chance to really tap into the sporty nature of speed and power and the real thrill of the build. Instead we got more of the same, and nobody needs the same anymore.
There is some really cool ‘thrill of the build’ stuff in Mobsteel, but too much of the show is thinly-veiled scripted nonsense like using a blowtorch near a gas tank (that was clearly empty at the time) suddenly “catching on fire” just as the show was going to break, or a siren behind the crew, which we found out after coming back from break turned out to be an ambulance.
It being Detroit, Mobsteel could highlight the daily grind of earning a living in a dying automotive market. Instead, it being Detroit, we got lines like, “it’s a bullet hole?”
“A bullet hole? Nice.”
It’s not even that the dialogue is stupid, or that lines like that undercut everything the crew says about Detroit the rest of the show, it’s that the bullet hole exchange may have been the most compelling dialog of the entire first episode.
The rebuild was pedestrian—again, given the budget constraints—and it made me wonder why they would have picked that car for the first episode, or why there wasn’t a secondary storyline with something much crazier, bolder and more interesting.
The second episode did have two storylines, including a very brief trip to a farm to help a guy redo his big rig with a new grill, in exchange for some of the guy’s beef. Yes, Steve-O chased a cow for a while. No, they did not play Yakety Sax.
“Lets get your grill on, so I can get my grill on,” Genei says to his cattle-ranching friend, which is a pretty good line I will admit.
The main story of episode two was about the crew rebuilding two old trucks into one monster work truck with flames and smoke stacks and a totally rebuilt back end they fabricated from scratch. Instead of spending the entire episode on all the inner-workings of how to essentially build a truck out of nothing, Mobsteel spent at least 30 minutes trying to hide the truck, and how much the parts cost, from Pam.
“Don’t tell Pam” may not have been the name of the episode, but it should have been, and it made Pam out to be an old fuddy duddy, and the enemy of those good ol’ boys having fun at work. Yes, Adam loves Pam, but he loves fun too and Pam is all business. They’ve established the dynamic early, and it’s so horrifically lazy that if they had to go there in episode two, they might as well turn over the keys to the whole thing now.
If they did that, though, we’d never get such amazing interactions as Adam telling Wheatbread to watch his head on a garage door, to which Wheatbread replied, “how can you watch your head?”
Come to think of it, he’s got a point. It still would have been had he hit his head. At least then there would have been something worth remembering.
Just two episodes in, Mobsteel already needs a bit of a rebuild. It’s fine to be fun and goofy in an effort to come off as engaging, but the parts of the show that really worked were the most grounded, not the nonsense.
If this NBCSN vehicle focuses on the cars, the city and four hardworking Joes (and one hardworking Pam), they might have something worth watching.
If the show is just junk like “when in doubt, muscle it out” and very little drama outside of two small fires, a stalled out truck and trying not to scratch the paint job while they put in an engine (they didn’t even come close to scratching the paint), Mobsteel might be headed to the junkyard sooner than anyone at NBCSN would like.
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